#morality

fuckyeahisawthat:

Let’s talk about God in Good Omens.

“…God does not pay dice with the universe. I play an ineffable game of my own devising. For everyone else, it’s like playing poker in a pitch-dark room, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules and who smiles all the time.“

I feel like we don’t give God enough credit for telling us exactly who she is with this line. Yes, it’s funny and said in a breezy Frances McDormand voice, but it’s also kind of terrifying. That game does not sounds like a fun game for anyone but God, for whom it’s probably hilarious. And I think this really sets the tone for God in Good Omens (the TV series, at least).

Good Omens opens up the possibility that God is cruel. She is, at the very least, indifferent to a lot of human suffering, and is sometimes in the business of causing it. Her punishments are harsh, indiscriminate and irreversible. This is a God who drowns children to make a point. She admits that her creations fear her, and does not seem to have a problem with that. She’s capricious with damnation and forgiveness. (Crowley fell for asking a few questions and hanging out with the wrong crowd; Aziraphale straight up gives his flaming sword away and that’s fine.) She doesn’t seem to mind that her angels behave horrifically, from mundane bullying up to summary execution.

She is not merciful. She provides no answers, not even to the faithful. She does not come to the aid of those who call on her. Crowley tells Aziraphale that he shouldn’t count on God to come and fix things, and he’s right. At times, God seems downright sadistic. (Think about the plant scene as some kind of traumatic reenactment of Crowley being cast out of Heaven. Then think about the fact that God herself is narrating this scene in a tone of detached amusement. That’s fucked up!)

One of the reasons that Crowley is such a sympathetic character is that he asks the same questions that any person who has both faith and compassion would ask. (The idea that a demon is the moral center of the story is a think for another post.) If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why is there so much suffering in the world? Is God actively causing the suffering? Why? Does she just not care? Why doesn’t she make it stop?

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@inthroughthesunfroof reply: You said what I’ve been thinking, just, much more beautifully. I don’t know what Pratchett and Gaiman’s religious beliefs are, beyond both having a strong humanist streak. Good Omens doesn’t read like an athiest work, it reads like someone wrestling with the fundamental question that all Christians run into: Given an all-knowing and all-powerful God whom we are told literally is love, why does suffering exist? Why does this suffering exist? How can our God be so cruel?

It’s a question that has broken many people’s faith, including mine. Good Omens doesn’t pretend to answer why, but it does answer so now what with a resoundingly humanist perspective. Whether or not God loves us, whatever that means, the only reasonable way for us to live is to love each other.

It’s a surprisingly biblical answer. Matthew 22:36-40:

36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a]38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

If the God of the Bible is real, I don’t know if They’ll forgive a loss of faith. I hope They won’t be too disappointed if people who fail to follow the first commandment hang onto the second.

@ilarualreply: This is such a good post, and really articulates a lot of the thoughts that serve as the backdrop for basically all my readings of the lead characters of GO (both the immortals and the humans). The point is not: is God there? will God save us? Instead, the point is: it is imperative that we assume that there will be no divine intervention, and that it is up to us to work our own interventions.

It’s interesting to me that the human characters do not seem to give a fuck about God. Adam and the Them care about their world, and they care about protecting it regardless of what anyone, divine or otherwise, has to say about it. Anathema, likewise, isn’t interested in anyone’s guidance but Agnes’s. As for Tracy and Shadwell and Newt… they’re just along for the ride, they’re not worried about big theological questions. They’re just humans, messy, lovely, ridiculous humans who are just Doing Their Best when they find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. And all of them have no truck with any Great Plan, whether it’s God’s or anyone else’s— the human characters just want their planet left in one piece. Humanity’s responsible for wrecking it, and humanity’ll be responsible for fixing it, thank you very much. It’s only Heaven and Hell who have any real investment in what God wants or doesn’t want. Squabbling children who are still, after millennia, vying for Mom’s attention no matter how silent and indifferent She may be.

And as for our show-stealing leads…

Obviously Aziraphale’s entire journey over the course of the story is about finally giving up the ghost and accepting what he’s known to be true, in his heart of hearts, for awhile now: God isn’t coming to help you. God isn’t going to tell you what the right thing to do is. You need to do for yourself, you need to speak for yourself, you need to take action, because if you don’t, then who will? Aziraphale’s story is about recognizing that maybe God really does have a plan for all this, but maybe it’s cruel and unjust. And, not knowing what the plan is, if there is one, it is imperative that we step up and act with radical kindness, because to do otherwise is unthinkable.

Crowley… well… OP said it all. Crowley understands this. He is the only character in the entire series that actually addresses God directly, and we know She hears him. She sees, She hears, and there’s a distinct possibility that Crowley and Aziraphale were Her answer all along, but whether that’s the case or not, She’s not telling. And that indifferent silence? Crowley knows that’s cruelty, and that’s why Crowley so thoroughly rejects the false dichotomy of Heaven and Hell. He knows, has known for millennia, that it’s all bullshit. And he knows Aziraphale knows it too, it’s just a matter of getting to admit it.

In the novel, we’re left with absolute silence from God. Maybe God is there, maybe not, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter because we’ve got to take care of each other regardless. But in the show? God is there, God is watching, and God is a smug asshole.

It would be easy to confuse omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence with perfection. But God, it is said, created humanity in Her own image, and if you look at what humanity is like, capable of both extraordinary good and extraordinary evil… well, I think that says just as much about God as it does about us.

#god is human but on a cosmic scale #is basically my praxis both within the context of GO and within the context of just like… religion in general #either god is imperfect & fallible or god is unceasingly cruel #it’s up to the individual to decide which interpretation they can live with

@pisces-atdcomment: also worth noting the somewhat humorous line in the end of the series, in which gabriel states “god does not play games with the universe” and crowley responds “where have you been?” crowley and aziraphale have been living on earth for so long that they’ve SEEN things. think about it: they were the only ones actually THERE right before God literally drowned everyone except for Noah and his family. they’ve seen the type of things god is responsible for. every time aziraphale says “god’s plans are ineffable”, crowley is right there to jump in and ask “why?” which honestly is probably what got him thrown out of Heaven in the first place. eventually, aziraphale stops saying that. he never truly turns his back on heaven, not until the very end, but that’s not because he LOVES heaven or even god. he keeps his foot in the door out of fear. and crowley never truly aligns with hell, but he’d rather be on his own side with aziraphale than ever go back to heaven and work for god again. being on earth for so long, crowley and aziraphale side with the humans more than anyone else. they question hell and heaven, and more importantly, they question god. there’s literally a scene in crowleys office when he’s talking upwards, toward god, and asking “why? why does it have to be this way?” the angels and demons never ask, because for the most part they don’t CARE. the ineffable/great plan is just about a power struggle to them. also worth mentioning that god, in this situation, is about as chaotic as a 13 year old angsts fanfic writer. loving the beauty of suffering for the sake of the story, loving the heart wrenching plot twists, loving to panic and fear and chaos caused by her “ineffable” plan. fine in writing, evil when playing with the lives of real beings. but god has never seen it that way, in the same way angels and demons don’t value human life. I mean, they don’t really give a shit about killing 7 billion humans (not to mention the plants and animals) and of course, to mirror the scene in crowleys office where he’s speaking towards the ceiling to god, there’s a scene later where aziraphale literally calls god and asks to speak with her directly. both of them asking the same thing: “why? does there really need to be a war? can we stop this?” in conclusion: god is cruel and aziraphale and crowley are the only two on either side who understand this concept.

@no-gentle-stormsreply: Sir Terry in a nutshell. See: Small Gods.

You know, as a millennial who rebelled against their parents’ strict black-and-white fundamentalist worldview by finding and fully embracing the grayness of everyday morality, it’s really jarring to watch Gen Z rebel against their parents’ strict black-and-white worldviews by adopting an equally rigid black-and-white worldview that just clings to the polar opposite opinions of their parents’. It’s like watching someone who’s complained about being forced to wear dresses their whole life decide to rebel by wearing only blue dresses instead of pink ones. You’re not getting rid of what your parents forced you into; you’re just changing the look of it. 

Patton: Why is there blood everywhere?!?!?!?!?!?

Virgil: I may have aggressively poked someone with a knife

Patton: YOU STABBED SOMEONE?!?!?!?!?!??

Virgil: No no NO, aggressively poked them with a knife

emphasisonthehomo:

Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.

Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.

Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.

Oops, someone dropped the truth.

dailynietzsche:

“All psychology so far has got stuck in moral prejudices and fears. It has not dared to descend into the depths.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §23 (excerpt).

hello-trubble:

ratfarm:

I am sick of seeing anarchists who promote violence.

I want to make it very clear that myself and the rest of Rat Farm do not advocate or endorse any one/thing that promotes violence and antagonism/escalation tactics to further their cause. We are committed to the Non-Aggression Principle, an ethical stance that asserts that “aggression” (defined as initiation or threatening the use of force over any individual or individual’s property) is inherently wrong. However, this is not to be confused with Pacifism as the NAP does not preclude forceful self-defense.

DO NO HARM, TAKE NO SHIT

9/17/17

Have you read Edward Abbey’s master thesis about Anarchism and the Morality of Violence? Abbey examines some of the founding philosophies of anarchism and poses the question of whether violence is ever moral in an anarchistic context. Spoiler: it isnt.

I haven’t but I definitely will! Thanks!

marten-blackwood:

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.”

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

I’m going to be honest: this reading made me feel literally sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up. Which, whatever. As someone who has been in a relationship, and has talked to a lot of people who have been in sustained relationships, I am honestly repulsed by some of the comments of these young women. I don’t mean to say it as a judgement thing - what irritates me most is the culture that causes such sentiments, but I’ll get back to that. I also don’t mean it targetted against women; I would be just as angry at men who voice such opinions. Society giving men leave to be sexually promiscuous is completely ludicrous, and the biology they base it off of is severely flawed (I also hate most scientific arguments for things - if there’s a social bias available, I stay skeptical of the argument; science is much less telling than the 20th century has convinced us it is, and any real scientist should acknowledge that).

The arguments used by the women to justify cheating are so revealing of the privileged middle+ class view of love. Delaying adulthood? What a joke! The refusal to take responsibility in one’s life and DO SOMETHING is what is driving this world down the drain. Not that it was better before or after, but that doesn’t make it less of a major problem, and it’s easier now to do it. But that is not the central conversation. Basically, I agree with Alison: cheating is bad, period. I found it interesting that the writers mentioned her “strict conservative views on sexuality, positioned her outside of the collegiate culture of delayed adulthood” because honestly what does that mean? What conservative views? How do conservative views immediately connect to delayed adulthood? If anything, I would argue that her early marriage - which may have been influenced by conservative views on sex - and making that work, or trying to, is probably what puts her outside of the culture of delayed adulthood. Which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing.

Again, drawing back to my point earlier this term about “enacted age” and “comprehensive age” - I think these women sound very immature, and it makes sense because this is a sampling of class-privileged women and they have been able to afford to be selfish. Don’t get me wrong, people who are underprivileged can also be selfish, but less easily, and generally with different motivations (I don’t want to go in-depth about privilege/race/class, but I think a rough idea is hinted at in my discussion of Not Under My Roof). Most of them have not yet been through a string of divorces and not yet realized that “the perfect one” that “you won’t want to cheat on” doesn’t exist in a way that women who grow up in communities of fatherless households might. I’m completely generalizing, but that is the sort of statement I expect to hear from people who have not actually talked to couples about the struggle that marriage often is.

I don’t mean to be offensive or super critical - I’m just listening to P!nk and venting - this is just something that I care a lot about because, again, my own expectations about love really set me up for a lot of pain, and I honestly think society’s twisted standards does the same for our relationships. Let me explain.

Wilkins describes how the women interviewed unanimously agreed that they valued monogamy and shamed cheating. But they also saw a validity for cheating in certain circumstances, and half of them had cheated. I really agree with Wilkins conclusion, which was that:

eternal-echoes:

Marcia Segelstein: How has moral relativism come to be so predominant?

Hadley Arkes: I think the erosion of natural law and the tendency toward moral relativism go back to ancient times with ancient skeptics making the argument for relativism. You can see the arguments surfacing in Plato’s Protagoras. In the Anglo-American law, it was getting accelerated from the early part of the twentieth century. It was bound up with historicism and the notion taking hold in Germany that we could know things only within their historical context, i.e., that certain things will be made clear only as history unfolds.

My late professor, Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago, wrote his critical book, Natural Right and History, in 1953. That was mid-century and he was already standing against the currents of relativism. Already they were deeply at work. Here was a country established on the Declaration of Independence—on truths grounded in nature, objective moral truths, self-evident truths—and yet falling into the wave of relativism. Strauss spoke about the effect of German philosophy on America—and here I’m paraphrasing—that it would not be the first time that a country defeated on the battlefield imposed on the victor the yoke of its own thought. Here we defeated the Germans, and yet German philosophy in its worst forms was taking hold in this country.

In the course I teach at Amherst that became the basis for the book First Things, I tell my students the biblical story of God instructing Elijah to journey to Damascus. Ultimately it is Elisha who fulfills this directive, traveling there to tell Hazael that “the Lord has shown me that you are to be king over Syria,” and that the current king, Ben-Hadad, “shall certainly die.” One commentator thought that this story, dating to the sixth century B.C., was a sign of how early the Jews were committed to monotheism. I ask the students what the connection is with moral relativism.

The answer is that a God who could tell a prophet to cross the lines of one jurisdiction to cashier a leader in another place was obviously not one of those local gods known to antiquity. This was evidently a God with universal jurisdiction. After all, I ask, did the same God who authored a universal law of physics author separate morals for Zanzibar and Jersey City? And what were the Ten Commandments? Were they municipal regulations, meant only to govern the immediate environs of Mt. Sinai?

-Courage and Conversion: An Interview with Hadley Arkes

“You cannot have it both ways. If you claim the right to pick and choose the nice bits of the Bible and sweep the nasty bits under the carpet, you have sold the pass. You have admitted that you do not, as a matter of fact, get your values from an ancient and authoritative holy book.You are demonstrably getting your values from some modern source, some contemporary liberal consensus or whatever it is. Otherwise by what criterion do you choose the good bits of the Bible while rejecting, say, Deuteronomy’s clear injunction to stone non-virgin brides to death?

Wherever this contemporary liberal consensus may come from, I am entitled to appeal to it when I explicitly reject the authority of my ancient text - the DNA - just as you are entitled to appeal to it when you implicitly reject your - rather less ancient - texts from human scriptures. We can all sit down together and work out the values we want to follow. Whether we are talking about four-thousand-year-old parchment scrolls, or four-thousand-million-year-old DNA, we are all entitled to throw off the tyranny of the texts.”

- Richard Dawkins, ‘Science in the Soul’

“…one is a moral agent only if one is a rational agent. Only if we can see another being as one who acts to achieve some rational end in the light of some rational beliefs will we understand him in the same fundamental way that we understand ourselves and our fellow persons in everyday life.”

— M Moore, Law and Psychiatry: Rethinking the Relationship(1984)

vyrtuosoart:

Tfw u turn in fanart for an art project

Also the lines all mean something specific and im kinda curious if yall can figure it out

@thatsthat24

I decided to reblog the answer since its been a few days and no one got it

most of you who answered got the fact that the colors represent the sides, yes, but its more specific than that.

i made a graph using the alphabet and then plotted the points- so id go to the side one letter, down the next, and continue until the name was done. on names that had uneven letters, id just repeat the first letter of the name. so Virgil’s is Anxiety(a), and Logans is Logic(l). the rest are the same. i split romans and remus’s as creativity so romans is creati- and remus’ is -vity. 

so basically not only does the line represent the side, but it literally spells out the side’s name/function.

its not perfect bc i didnt have a ruler on hand lol, but the concept is still the same. 

“It’s too early to be awake, five more minutes,” Virgil grumbled, hauling the comforter up to cover his bitterly cold frame.

“But-,” Patton pouted as he gently yanked Virgil’s arm, “there’s snowwwww!”

“Sleep,” Virgil rolled over and shut his eyes.

“Virge!” Patton pulled the bedspread away, “please?”

“…fine.”

To be good is not something most people consider anymore; they’ve all surrendered to their odious fate. And those who are good don’t need to consider it–it’s simply innate. But what about those of us plagued with the desire for deviance and benevolence? Or, not even the desire for deviance, simply a need for distraction. And, as we all know, any distraction worth its weight in distractive properties requires a certain level of iniquity. Whether this means drinking, drugging or promiscuity, the constant grappling between good and evil is always there. Particularly if you live in Los Angeles or New York, the U.S. hubs of human pleasure and misery. 

There are periods of dormancy in the evil one feels prone to. Going months without even the slightest predilection toward debauchery, however, usually means you’re due for an unexpected bender to make up for all the lost time in evil. One night, after being a good little ducky and working/not spending money in earnest, you will feel the call of life–the bar, the club, the meaningless sex prospect–all of it. 

And after you’ve engaged in your binge of vileness, you’ll be left feeling empty–like none of it was worth the disgust you feel for yourself in the wake of it. Like you should promptly go out and join one of the handful of convents still left in the world in order to cleanse yourself of your weak-willed, pitiful nature. 

Instead, you will go on as before, vacillating intermittently between the extremes of good and evil that you despise–after all, the middle ground on the spectrum of morality is too dull to bear. The pattern of fluctuation will tear at your psyche and your soul until you finally give in fully to one side of your persona. And can you guess which side is more tantalizing? I think so. 

© Genna Rivieccio 2015

One thing that A Series of Unfortunate Events does really well is that it establishes very early on to a quite young audience that sometimes people don’t mean it personally when they hurt you, but that doesn’t excuse their behavior.

Take Mr. Poe for instance: in every single encounter the Baudelaire orphans have with him, he messes everything up. He consistently puts the children in dangerous situations just because it’s convenient for him, he never listens to what the children actually have to say, and he refuses to be held accountable for his own mistakes, thereby dooming himself to make them over and over again.

If you divide it up evenly, Mr. Poe is just as responsible for the children’s ill fate as Count Olaf because for every single book in which he’s involved, and up through The Carnivorous Carnival in the Netflix series, he is capable of righting the situation and saving the children and he still decides to save his own behind rather than helping the children who are in dire need of an adult figure they can trust. Desmond Tutu famously said that “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”.

And yet, Handler draws a distinctive line between Mr. Poe and Count Olaf in the series because one truly is worse than the other. Mr. Poe doesn’t mean to harm the children, and genuinely does care about their wellbeing, even if he is awful at doing so. He is always appalled when Count Olaf is actually revealed at the end and he does want the children to be safe. Count Olaf on the other hand actually hates the children and means to cause them harm.

The series draws the same distinction between Charles and Sir in that regard and Jerome and Esme, as well. It makes the point that people hurt each other and do harm in the world for all sorts of reasons and very rarely is it personal - that we shouldn’t take it personally when people are bad because adults are fallible too and sometimes they make mistakes without thinking. But even more so, the series makes the point that unintentionality does not excuse the harm that they do. Just because someone doesn’t hate you and that someone didn’t mean to harm you doesn’t mean you are obligated to forgive them or be understanding of their position. So often in this world people make excuses for their behavior, saying they didn’t mean to do something or they didn’t understand the effect it would have or they just weren’t listening and we’re expected to accept their apology and move on because we’re told intent means everything.

But the thing is, intent isn’t everything. Intent is only half the battle and our actions always have consequences, regardless of whether we like those consequences or not. Ignorance is not an excuse for inaction because it is our responsibility in the world as citizens of the world to be conscious of the effect our choices could have on others. The Baudelaire orphans never forgive Mr. Poe, and in The Penultimate Peril when Mr. Poe approaches them and offers them help and offers to take them to their next home, they refuse his help and their refuse his apology because his intentions in that instance don’t matter because he created great harm in the world and just because he didn’t foresee it doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have. This follows the same vein as excusing someone’s behavior because it was rooted in deep trauma or mental illness or justified revenge - the reason why someone did something wrong doesn’t matter, they still did something wrong and they need to face up to their crimes.

It was an important message then, but I think it’s an even more important one now in the political climate that we live in. There are so many people in this world right now who want to cause harm: neo-Nazis, the alt-right, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, and we have an administration that actively takes delight in causing harm to oppressed people as long as it stands to benefit them in some financial way. They know they are hurting people and they continue to do so anyways so long as it makes them more comfortable. These are the Count Olafs of the world.

But then there are the ignorant people that support Trump and his administration, that do racist things like calling the cops on black people just because they look “suspicious”, or use their religion as an excuse to justify discrimination, and simply regurgitate everything they’ve been told by others just as ignorant as them about the way the world ought to work, and those are the people who pave the way for the Count Olafs of the world. It is easier to excuse their bad behavior because they really don’t mean for what they do to cause harm - most of the time they genuinely think they’re doing the right thing - but their actions have just as big of consequences as the actions of the Count Olafs. The children never would have ended up in Count Olaf’s clutches time and time again if Mr. Poe hadn’t put them there. The Count Olafs are worse, and it’s important to recognize the difference between intended harm and unintended harm, but we have to hold the Mr. Poes of the world accountable too, because ignorance is just as much a choice as malice.

I’ve always loved the poem that Count Olaf recites to Kit just before he dies in The End, and by love of course, I mean I bawl my eyes out every single time I read it. He only reads the last stanza aloud, but here is the poem in its entirety:

         They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
              They may not mean to, but they do.   
         They fill you with the faults they had
             And add some extra, just for you.

         But they were fucked up in their turn
             By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
         Who half the time were soppy-stern
            And half at one another’s throats.

         Man hands on misery to man.
             It deepens like a coastal shelf.
         Get out as early as you can,
             And don’t have any kids yourself.

                  - Philip Larkin

Obviously, we can understand why Handler didn’t want to include explicit profanity in a book written for middle grade children, but I really do love the fact that the first two stanzas are left unsaid and the reader, if interested actually has to go and research them and find them out for themself, because that is one of the points of the poem and one of the points of the series - that people don’t tell you the whole story and that things are always much more complicated than they seem - even things that seem like black and white morality are always so much more complicated.

Yes, your parents mess you up and ruin you, just like the Baudelaires find out in The Penultimate Peril and The End that their parents were not perfect and possibly even are the reason why all this horror has been happening to them, but the story is more complicated than that and the Baudelaires (and the readers) are left for themselves whether or not they want to leave it be - just read the last verse - or they want to explore for themselves and maybe not like what they find.

Ever since The Austere Academy, the Baudelaires have been told that the VFD was a noble organization and filled with volunteers that will help them, but the noble side of the VFD also produced lots of people who did horrible things: the Baudelaire parents, Jerome Squalor, Lemony and Kit Snicket. The VFD taught them to follow blindly and so they blindly followed and they accepted authority at its face value and as a result they became corrupted by those in power.

Ultimately, this poem is about the cycle of abuse and misery in this world. “Man hands misery onto man”, we inherit our trauma from each other and we create our own demons out of the demons that have been fed to us, and we tell ourselves that we won’t do the same, but we indubitably will. To be human is to be messed up, and the kindest thing you can do in life is to not bring any more people into the world.

But particularly interesting to me is Count Olaf’s recitation of the poem. Because in the passage, he’s not reciting it to to the Baudelaires, he’s reciting it to Kit, as she gives birth on a coastal shelf. On a personal, theoretical level, I have always used this as evidence that Beatrice II was Count Olaf’s biological daughter, but also it acts as a symbol of Count Olaf’s journey - he is an awful, awful man who has hurt the children put into his care time and time again and probably messed them up on some psychological level for the rest of their lives, but he too was messed up and turned out by the world by the people who raised and shaped him, and ultimately the root of evil goes back much further than we’d like to think. We’d like to think that Count Olaf is just a cruel, uncaring man who acts the way he does out of cold-blood, but the world doesn’t work that way and he’s trying to tell Kit that he is the way he is because of his history, that he was jaded by the world young and he never managed to escape, and that he’s not actually a bad man. But even as he recites the poem, he laughs, because he recognizes his complicity in everything - he has handed down his misery as well and he has brought a child into the world against all warning. It is him recognizing his crimes and his irony, something the Baudelaires and Kit never thought he would do.

It also serves a larger purpose in that Count Olaf has always been described as unintelligent and dismissive of intellect and reading and the orphans have always maintained that if a person is well-read they must be a good person and that reading is what makes people good. Because Count Olaf is not good, and yet he is able to recite an obscure poem - written by a librarian, no less - in the blink of an eye. Throughout the entirety of The End, Count Olaf has defied his stereotype by proving to be intelligent and capable of empathy and eschewing everything we thought we knew about him. Things are always more complicated than they seem and go back further than you’d like to think, and the world itself is a messed up place - a conundrum of esoterica, if you will - and defies any pithy explanation you might try and force upon it.

So I’ve always had this theory that after the Baudelaire parents killed Count Olaf’s parents they stole his fortune (why else would a count be so poor?) and that’s why he’s so obsessed with stealing the Baudelaire fortune, because he thinks it’s rightfully his and they took it from him. I’ve heard of several other people who have essentially this same theory and a lot of those people believe it’s the point that Count Olaf turned bad. If you include the Netflix series as canon (which I do), then you know that Count Olaf wasn’t always bad and once was “noble”. The question then becomes, when did he turn bad? 

But ultimately I don’t think Count Olaf did turn bad. I don’t think he turned bad for the simple reason that I don’t think Daniel Handler (or me for that matter) believes that people can “turn bad”. People just do bad things and all that makes up who we are is our actions in this world. Olaf used his grief and anger as an excuse for vile behavior in the name of revenge and used his tragic past as justification to act cruel to people who hadn’t actually harmed him. The Baudelaire orphans weren’t responsible for their parents’ misdoings - they were just there and Olaf took his revenge out on him. 

That’s why I love Olaf’s “redemption arc” so much - because it doesn’t actually redeem him. There’s a lot of debate and internal conflict in The Penultimate Peril and The End about whether the Baudelaire orphans and Count Olaf are the same and whether the orphans are just as bad as him. But ultimately, what distinguishes Olaf from the Baudelaire orphans in the end is that the Baudelaires were “noble enough” and understood that bad situations don’t excuse bad behavior. They did bad things, but they regretted it and they only did it if it was absolutely necessary. Olaf had an incredibly tragic story - probably one of the most tragic of any children’s villain in American canon - and it’s okay to feel sad for him when you read it, but he ruined all chance at redemption when he used his tragic story as an excuse to continue perpetuating the cycle of abuse. 

So much of ASOUE is a metaphor about child abuse and abusers (Handler was a survivor of CSA) and Olaf represents an abusive person who also suffered abuse. His decision to be cruel to others after experiencing intense cruelty himself is what the cycle of abuse is at its very core. It’s very sad, and it makes you look at the whole situation differently, but in the end he chose to do what he did even though he had first hand experience with how much it ruins people and that is what makes him the villain and the Baudelaires the heroes despite any tragic backstory Snicket can give 

Many people view pornography as a public health hazard, arguing that it’s inherently bad for our sex lives, relationships, and mental health. Embedded in a lot of arguments about the negative effects of porn is that the more you use it, the more problems you’re going to experience. I mean, the concept of “porn addiction” pretty much implies non-stop, out-of-control use, right? 

Interestingly, however, new research challenges this idea that more porn necessarily means more negative impacts. In fact, it finds precisely the opposite—the people using the least porn are reporting the most problems. So what’s that all about?

We’ll get to that in a second, but first, let’s discuss the new study, recently published in the Journal of Sex Research. The data come from a national sex survey in Germany involving 4,177 participants (44% women; age range of 18-75). The sample was weighted to be representative of the German population, but the final sample only included those who had consumed porn at some point in their lives.

Participants completed a survey about their porn use and sex lives. For purposes of the survey, “watching pornography” was defined broadly to include all media depictions of sexual and erotic acts (including film, photos, text, etc.) used for purposes of sexual arousal. Participants were asked to report how often they watched porn over the last year. They were also asked to report the impact that porn had on their sex lives, with response options including no impact, positive impact, negative impact, and both positive and negative impacts.

What kind of impacts did participants report? The majority (62%) reported no impact on their sex life. One-quarter (25%) reported a positive impact, 11% reported a mixed impact (both positive and negative), and just 2.5% said the impact was only negative. Of those who reported negative impacts only, most (57.5%) were men.  

This is interesting in and of itself because, put another way, the vast majority (87%) of porn users report no impact or positive impacts only. It’s a relatively small group who report any negative impacts, and negative impacts only is uncommon.

Another interesting finding from the study was that “individuals who linked their pornography use to adverse sexual outcomes reported substantially less frequent use than participants who reported a positive role of pornography.” That’s right: less porn = more problems. 

To many, this will seem counterintuitive. So why do low frequency users report more problems? There are a few potential explanations.

One possibility is that those who are using less porn are more religious. Several studies have found that greater religiosity is linked to lower porn use—and, at the same time, greater religiosity is linked to feeling morally conflicted about using porn. When moral incongruence is present (that is, you’re watching porn but you feel like it’s morally wrong), that’s when we tend to see negative impacts of porn. It doesn’t really matter how much you’re watching; rather, what matters is that you’re doing something that makes you feel morally conflicted. This can create psychological distress. And it can lead people to label their behavior as “addictive” even if it’s occurring at a low frequency.

Consistent with this idea, the new study I’ve been discussing above found that having a more religious upbringing and having moral issues with porn were linked to reporting more negative impacts. 

Another possibility is that maybe some of the people in the negative impact group are watching different kinds of porn. This study didn’t account for the type of porn consumed, so it’s at least possible that this might play a role.

With all of that said, these results are fascinating because they challenge the popular idea that greater porn consumption necessarily translates to more sexual problems. Instead, it appears that frequency of use isn’t really the key to understanding the effects of porn. Far more people report no impact or positive impacts of porn than negative impacts—and the negative impacts likely have more to do with the moral lens through which you view porn.

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click herefor more from the blog or here to listen to the podcast. Follow Sex and PsychologyonFacebook, Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTubeandInstagram.

To learn more about this research, see: Štulhofer, A., Wiessner, C., Koletić, G., Pietras, L., & Briken, P. (2021). Religiosity, Perceived Effects of Pornography Use on Personal Sex Life, and Moral Incongruence: Insights from the German Health and Sexuality Survey (GeSiD). The Journal of Sex Research.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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ace-spiritwell:

1-1snailxd-art:

Also, reminding myself of this daily.

Shhhhhhooooiiiiitttt!!! I’ve been called out!!!

Also Jaden animations, nice.

They are my fav animation youtuber

Also, reminding myself of this daily.

water-whisp:

uendwen:

stormyskiesandbutterflies:

faerieglade:

faerieglade:

“theyre homophobic but theyre good people!!!” hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. are they really. are they REALLY. are they. are theyr eally. Are the

this post is making straight people mad keep reblogging

“theyre racist but theyre good people!!!”

“theyre transphobic but theyre good people!!!”

“they support laws that allow school shootings but theyre good people!!”

“they appoint rapists in the supreme court but theyre good people!!!”

Yeah they’re. they’re not. they’re really not.

Good people don’t hurt others knowingly.

Good people can make mistakes and unknowingly hurt others through ignorance.

…But good people don’t continue to make those same mistakes after seeing the damage they’ve caused.

Good. People. Don’t. Hurt. People. Knowingly.

They’re ‘ good people ’to ‘ you ’.

There’s an expression I grew up with, that was often said after “but they are goop people!”

“If they weren’t good they’d be in jail.”

It’s sarcastic in the extreme. Following the rules and abiding by laws does not make one moral, nor does it make anyone good. 

Being good to only one group or type of people isn’t goodness - it is conformity, and it is at best moral laziness.

“Men come and go, cities rise and fall, whole civilizations appear and disappear—the earth remains slightly modified. The earth remains, and the heartbreaking beauty where there are no hearts to break. Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.”

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness: A Celebration of the Beauty of Living in a Harsh and Hostile Land — Edward Abbey